Available now:
- Extra Time in Hub #99
http://www.hubfiction.com/2009/10/hub-99/

This Nebula Awards self-promotion thing, I mean.

Sigh.

Under the new rules, I have one short story that is definitely eligible. That's 'Extra Time', which was electronically published by Hub this October. If you wish to, you can read it here: http://hubfiction.com/hub/Hub_99.pdf

(An aside: I find it a bit perplexing that stories published by a British electronic magazine are eligible under the rules while stories published by an award-winning British print magazine/anthology like Postscripts are not. But those are the rules.)

Not so clear cut are 'The Last Botnet' and 'String-driven Thing', published in Futures in Nature Physics and Nature respectively. Each of these publications describes itself as an "international journal". NPG, which publishes both, has offices in New York as well as London. Does that qualify it/them? If anyone more Nebula-savvy than me can answer that question, I'd be pleased to know.

If you'd like to read either of my Futures short-shorts, irrespective of their eligibility, please send me an LJ message containing your email address.

Now I'm going to wash my hands.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXnV1UNbTuM&feature=player_embedded

Quite simply the best video I have ever seen (or expect to see) on YouTube.

I was crying tears of joy while laughing fit to bust.

The standard of the animation is gob-smacking.

V.

Hub has published some fine stories recently. I can happily recommend the three found in issues 100-102, especially the Prague-set story in #102. (Actually, I quite like the story in #99, but I'll confess to more than the usual amount of subjectivity there!)

http://www.hubfiction.com/

Hub is free.

hubfiction.com/hub/Hub_99.pdf

Extra Time is my third story to be published in Hub and my fifteenth story to be published in all.

My thanks go to Lee Harris and the Hub posse.

String-Driven Thing is now ready for anthologising!

www.anthologybuilder.com/viewstory.php

This cosmology-abusing short-short was originally published in March of this year in Nature's Futures column. It's my thirteenth story to find a home on AnthologyBuilder.

Enjoy!

Vaughan

Hub Magazine will be publishing my story Extra Time in Issue 99, due soon.

Extra Time is that rare beast: a sports-themed fantasy story (with a hint of SF). It's been quite a wait since the acceptance (last October), but well worth it. Hub has around 10000 subscribers.

I'll put the link up when the issue comes out, sometime during the next few days.

A short video sequence I recorded during my first flight:



That's the pilot's voice not mine! I think he was trying to judge where I was pointing my tiny Sony Cybershot camera. Actually, the video turned out better than I expected.

In what I gather is stereotypical "bloke pushing 50" fashion, I'm throwing myself into new pursuits:





For those of you who don't know what I look like, I'm the one not wearing shades. Yes, I did take control at one point. No, I'm not a natural glider pilot, which doesn't come as much of a surprise given that I have the dexterity of your average tree. And yes, I am wearing a parachute. And no, it wouldn't have saved me at the kind of altitude we were flying at, even if I did know how to use it.

(Thanks go to my colleague John Bagshaw for taking the photo of me.)

Someone else's winch launch:



The fierce acceleration and rapid, steep climb came as a big surprise, as did the loud "bang" as the winch cable detached when we reached 1000 feet or so. It was a relief to know that the tail hadn't fallen off.

What else can I say? I loved every moment and would certainly do it again.

Vaughan

I'm taking a break from the novel today as my brain is too fuzzed from lack of sleep to move the plot forward. Instead, I've been busy on AnthologyBuilder...again.

The result is: On High -- Tales from halfway up the sky.

www.anthologybuilder.com/view_template.php?template_id=511

I've included stories from matthewsrotundo, maeve_the_red  and other LJ luminaries.

Enjoy.

The English Dead have returned to AnthologyBuilder after an absence of a little over a year. It is still possible that the anthology that wanted this story will be published, but because of ongoing delays the editor has withdrawn his exclusivity requirement, which is kind of him.

www.anthologybuilder.com/viewstory.php

The English Dead is probably my best story to date (IMHO); it was originally published by Hub in December 2007.

There's a great review here: thefix-online.com/reviews/hub-35-38/

Go on, you know you want to...

(Subtle hint ends)

First time I read a short story by aliettedb I thought: her novels will be on bookshop shelves before long.

And lo! The 3-novel deal has come to pass!

Excellent result! And thoroughly well deserved.

Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier who fought in the trenches of the Western Front, died yesterday aged 111.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6954937.stm

Some years ago, after watching a particularly compelling television documentary about the fast dwindling band of World War One veterans, I was prompted to write The Peace Criminal, about a deluded (or was he?) old soldier. But there was nothing deluded about Harry Patch or, I suspect, any of his peers. He was just an ordinary man who witnessed appalling events and then went on to live an extraordinary number of years. Those events are now gone from living memory.

RIP

Click here for more details: www.anthologybuilder.com/worldcon2009.php

(I just wish I could be there!)

I expect most of my LJ friends know this already, but just in case you don't...

AnthologyBuilder has exited Beta!



As if to celebrate, someone recently bought five of my stories!



The more the merrier ;-)

Stars in Her Eyes, which was published in Postscripts 17, has received an Honorable Mention in the Dozois Doorstep (aka "Year's Best Science Fiction").

Am I pleased, or what? I threw a huge pile of effort at that story over several years, as did my writers' group and the Milford 2004 crew, and I was mightily p***ed off that the only review I read was a stinker.

Big thanks go to snickelish for letting me know.

I, too, have two invite codes to give away -- first come, first served.

Edit (20 June):

Can't give 'em away, apparently!

(Has the dream rush ended?)

If not, leave a comment and I'll PM you one -- if you're quick enough!

V.

Various friends of mine, including  marshallpayne1 and aliettedb, have recently posted diversity analyses of the main characters in their published short fiction, which make for interesting reading. My rather paltry stock of published stories means that I'm going to take a purely qualitative view of my own work rather than crunch numbers.

If I have any strengths when it comes to depicting diversity, I suspect that it is in my female characters. I say this purely on the basis of feedback I've received from female readers, writers and editors. Two of my fourteen published stories feature female narrators. I feel that Family Tree (transcriptase.org/fiction/stanger-vaughan-family-tree/) and Slices of Life are two of my strongest stories; the latter was published in 3SF by Liz Holliday, who (take it from me!) would not have accepted an ineptly presented female lead. Several of my unpublished stories also feature female narrators; one contains an exclusively female cast.

I have written several stories that feature exclusively male characters, generally because the historical setting and/or derived events required it. A typical example is The English Dead (www.hubfiction.com/hub/Hub_36.pdf), published in Hub #36, in which Mallory and Irvine's attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1924 is recreated. My stories of elderly Apollo astronauts -- Sons of the Earth and Dying of the Light (aka TLP) -- are similar in that respect.

The ages of my characters covers a very wide spread, most memorably in The Peace Criminal, where the antagonist is a centenarian. Two generations of children are depicted in Family Tree (I'm rather proud of the Appleheads). Of course, quite a lot of my characters have ages similar to mine when I wrote their stories, or a little younger. I guess that's a common phenomena.

Sexuality is not an area my stories have touched on to any great degree, although there is certainly some sex (e.g. in Family Tree, In Deep with Janine and Slices of Life). Interestingly though, the adult Appleheads in Family Tree have formed a menage a trois. It occurs to me now that the two males might be bi-; it certainly didn't occur to me at the time of writing. The other story that has a (very weak) gay context is The English Dead, but more because of the speculation in some quarters about the real Mallory and Irvine than anything actually depicted in the story.

Regrettably, my published stories contain no people of colour and very few characters from cultural backgrounds significantly different to my own. However, things are not quite as simple they seem, because my various unpublished and/or unfinished stories contain characters drawn from a much wider range of backgrounds, including one PoC narrator. It frustrates me that none of these stories has sold yet, but perhaps the truth is that I'm not yet skilled enough in that aspect of writing. Hopefully I will improve, because I firmly believe that diversity in fiction (as in all else) is important.

(With the exception of The English Dead, all stories mentioned above are available for purchase at AnthologyBuilder: www.anthologybuilder.com/authordetails.php)

Vaughan

I can now be found on DreamWidth, with the same username as on LJ.

LJ remains my primary blog.

Feel free to friend me (or whatever the terminology is round here).

This entry was originally posted at http://vaughan-stanger.dreamwidth.org/478.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

The death of J G Ballard was announced earlier today.

This was not unexpected news, as he'd been ill with cancer for a long time, but sad none the less.

Ballard was truly one of the giants. If I compiled a list of my ten favourite short stories, there would be a couple of his on it for sure.

A few years ago, a fellow Milfordite described one of my stories as somewhat Ballardian. I can think of no greater compliment.

www.anthologybuilder.com/view_template.php

From my introduction:

Which would you rather do: continue to pound the keyboard of your misbehaving PC or turn the pages of a proper book made from dead trees?

Don't tell me you actually thought about that choice for more than a millisecond.

In this anthology you will find strange tales of touchy-feely interfaces and animated monkeys, the ultimate botnet and the blue screen of death, plus many other humorous and thought-provoking stories.

This book does not reboot.
---

For those days when your computer refuses to play ball...

;-)